origin of love

Forenote: I am not a poetry person. I usually don't vibe with or understand them.

As the piece is quite short (due to the 4h limit from the competition), I have been reading and re-reading it, going back to the start, and round and round I went, letting my brain be spun inside a washing machine of verses, soaking the intricate (and very steamy) metaphors within the lines.

Though the interactiveness of the piece only comes in two forms (the links between the stanza groups and the word buttons revealing further details), the "story" is linear. There is no choice to make (save for exploring the details and continuing through the verses).

I am not well versed (sorry) in poetry, with my knowledge essentially limited to fables and romantic French poems. But it stroke me how easy my eyes flew through the page, even if my expectations of rhymes would not be satisfied. The content of the poem was enthralling and captivating.

The poem starts with almost a prayer to a divine body, aching to be touched, and continues on an exploration of bodies, where one handles the other like a relic, while the other searches for pain. There is hunger within the poem, a devouring desire that cannot be satiated. It descends into a recollection of travels and inquisitions, a search of a home, and a remembrance of who one is and how much one is loved.

Save for the last passages, the hidden details brings forward a more lustful piece, almost akin to BDSM, adding onto the worshipping of one's lover's body. As the poem continues, the details softens into a declaration of love and loss of one's self without the other (and a small revenge).

I don't think I am done with this piece... for after many readings, I would still discover a new metaphor or a different take on an imagery. I don't think I will ever be done.

Hypertext poetry. A portrait of obsessive, excessive, limitless love. Or is it? The vivid, lascivious imagery offers an interesting thematic counterpart to the other Ectocomp 2022 entry, MARTYR ME, that also displays a similar co-mingling of sex and unexpected violence amid a sense of unreality. Is there something in the air? Ectocomp is horny this year. The story is strictly linear, with hyperlinks popping up annotation windows that offer further expansion on the link text. In fact, the whole work could be reproduced as a regular static poem, using the standard superscript numbering scheme to denote in-line footnotes and listing the annotations, sequentially, as a numbered list beneath the main body. Would be fun to see something like that in a trad printed poetry anthology one day.

This one is more interactive poetry than interactive fiction: a sequence of stanzas hyperlinked together, with additional lines that show up when you click particular words. It’s a genre that I haven’t seen much of before, but one that seems very well-suited to Twine’s format.

It’s about gay vampire lovers, which I adore. The writing is quite nice, and the poem overall is short but sweet. It feels like it’s just the length it should be.

I want to comment more on it, but unfortunately I’ve never been great at this type of criticism—I can write a lot about my feelings on different types of gameplay, but that’s not especially relevant here. So I’ll conclude by saying simply that I enjoyed it, and quoting a passage I especially liked:


only you love him the way
a wound bays for the knife
a raw socket misses the tooth
restless tongue probing
cavernous ache.